The Bunning Game

1. Jim Bunning, a Hall of Fame pitcher who is now a senator from Kentucky, single-handedly holds up a bill that would have extended COBRA and other benefits to the unemployed and kept thousands of transportation workers from becoming unemployed.

2. On the Senate floor, Richard Durbin of Illinois offers a metaphor for Bunning’s move: “This is a wild pitch you are throwing tonight because it is pitch that is hitting somebody in the stands. It’s hitting an unemployed worker in Illinois.” Apt, although it overstates Bunning’s arm strength; but to no effect. Bill still blocked.

4. Jim Bunning, after the senators adjourn just before midnight Thursday, allowing him to rest up and continue his filibuster through Monday, says, “I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9 o’clock. It is the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina, since they are the only team that has beat Kentucky this year.”

5. On Monday, Bunning makes an obscene gesture at ABC reporter Jonathan Karl; ABC refers to this as “brushback.” By now, Medicare reimbursements have been scrambled and the D.O.T. has had to furlough two thousand workers. Thousands more don’t get checks they were counting on.

“The Daily Show,” as one might expect, was able to do something with the Bunning story (“The Crazy Man and D.C.”). The main disagreement among commentators was whether Bunning’s move was most like a curveball, a “slippery fastball” or, as Dana Milbank had it, a screwball. That was one of ten sports metaphors Milbank managed to work into an eight-hundred-and-fifty-word column on Bunning—a number Close Read can only hope to match. (Has anyone examined how the debate over the N.F.L.’s overtime rules relates to that on cloture?)

No objection here to sports metaphors as such: they do offer a useful way of looking at politics, and baseball has a rich lexicon. Still, one hopes this drama (sorry—extra-inning game) ends before every term in it is deployed. Is there nothing in the Senate rulebook that the majority can use to be a majority?

And as an addendum, one more questionable moment in politics and sports: Golf Digest reports that Bill Clinton “took a call from Tiger Woods (on on “something unrelated,” according to Clinton’s spokesman) and “wished him well.”

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.